


not so fleeting

by mirrordance



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, M/M, because rin will be the death of him, his beauty is punishing, rei needs less coffee and more hugs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 19:38:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5714719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirrordance/pseuds/mirrordance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rei's job was just like any other, only played up to be glitzy and glamorous through the magic of cinema. Something sparkling, something exciting.</p><p>It was nothing like that. Until Rei met Matsuoka Rin. Because Matsuoka, with his easy grin and his open laugh, looked like he stepped fresh out of a top-selling action film.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not so fleeting

Days like these are out of the box. Rei didn’t mind them, but if he would have it, he would have a cup of coffee, two sugars and one cream -- to pronounce the bitterness within his job and his life -- and a classic novel on hand. Even better, a book about the theories of black holes and the film industry’s incessant inaccuracies to describe them. It’s a fitful dream for his fitful self but days like these are riddled with gunshots and explosions. 

Rei felt a rumble close to him, vibrating up and into his skin. He was undeterred, scanning the gridded map on his laptop quickly.

“Ryuugazaki, you have to receive their locations,” the director said. “It’s imperative that you find them now.”

“Standby,” he said, fingers flying over his keyboard. “I don’t have a direct location just yet.”

“Get them now,” she pressed. 

“I understand,” Rei said, scanning his computer. “Just give me a few more --”

“We need at least their coordinates,” the director said. Even in the worst of times, she was the most collected. Rei tried to reflect it. “Get them quick.”

“Roger,” Rei said. He breathed in, then out, keeping everything within him in balance. It was taking him a longer amount to find these two -- they were new agents to the headquarters and for whatever reason, they were not added into his system. He clicked his tongue, scanning once again for something, anything that offered a hint to their location. 

Something blinked at the corner of his screen. 

“Did you find something?” the director asked. 

“Yes,” Rei said, “Please give me a moment.”

“You have a minute.”

After typing in a few commands, two blocks began to blink on his screen. Two names labeled both of them accordingly and he read them aloud, testing.

“Yamazaki Sousuke,” he said. He tilted his head up, typing in a few keys to code the block blue. 

He typed in a few extra keys and the block next to it turned a bright, glaring red. 

“Matsuoka,” he read, “Rin.” He paused at the red for a moment before moving, swiftly, fingers tapping onto the keys like the rhythm of a metronome. The director reminded him again of his lack of time. He reached behind him for a small headset, fitting it into his ear. He clicked both blinking squares and pressed enter.

“Yamazaki-san,” he greeted, cordial as if he was speaking of the weather. The director was listening to his every word. She never interfered when he spoke to the agents but either way, he needed to showcase his best in front of her no matter what. “Matsuoka-san. Good evening.”

The sound of gunshots, tinny and jerky sparked in his ear. He frowned, unnerved from the sudden shots, but in distaste for the unclear audio. He thought he fixed that problem a week ago. He would have to look into this problem when he got back to the headquarters. More glaring issues were underway as a gruff, annoyed voice answered back. 

“Good evenings are not the way I would call this,” the gruff voice said. Before Rei could reply, a small explosion answered him instead.

“Oh my god, Sousuke,” someone else said, fanatic, excited, “Did you see that?”

“Rin,” Yamazaki replied, “Could you just --”

Rei listened as both of them were interrupted by a chorus of gunshots with Yamazaki cursing while Matsuoka cursed back, laughing. Rei clicked his tongue. They were wasting time -- time that could be used to report their mission, their weapons in need of repair, anything besides how “fucking awful” everything was according to Yamazaki.

“If you could be a bit more specific,” Rei said, “Then this might go more smoothly. So --”

“Hold on,” Yamazaki said. More gunshots. 

“Excuse me,” Rei interjected, clearing his throat. “If you would let me finish, please.”

He waited for a pause, but they continued. He clicked his tongue again, searched his computer for the volume control of their transmission and raised it to its highest. He cleared his throat, straightened up and said, “The director listens to every transmission I have. If your lack of professionalism continues to burn true, I will continue to wait until it does not.”

Finally, seemingly shocked silence. Or so Rei hoped.

“Thank you,” he said. “My name is Ryuugazaki Rei. I am your quartermaster. I am here to aid you in your missions. Be it weapon malfunctions, location identifications, or anything you cannot access with your own computers, I can do. Considering I was brought into this mission on short notice along with you two -- since you transferred only an hour ago into Tokyo’s headquarters -- I would like to introduce myself now to avoid confusion and complications.”

“This isn’t complicated? They couldn’t wait?” Yamazaki asked.

“Of course not,” Rei replied. “As you should know, time is of the essence with this job. I would expect you to understand that considering your profession. Punctuality should be as easy as breathing.”

Finally, actual shocked silence along with another beat of gunshots.

Matsuoka snorted. “Wow, I was not expecting that.”

“What?” Rei asked, absentmindedly. He scanned the map for open spaces scarce of their current targets. H found an empty, abandoned ramen shop near Yamazaki and Matsuoka’s location.

“No one can shut Sousuke up that quickly,” Matsuoka replied. “It takes me a bit of time to -- Holy --” 

Rei straightened, his fingers frozen on his keyboard. “Matsuoka-san?”

He was met with fuzzy static.

“Hello?” he asked, tapping his headset. 

“Was it only the transmission?” the director asked.

“Yes,” Rei said, searching through his computer to find a fix to the transmission signal. “I still have their locations.”

“Good,” she said, “Now get them back.”

Suddenly, piercing gunshots in his ear. This time Rei jerked back, his fingers hovering over his keyboard. 

“Hello?” he asked. “Matsuoka-san? Yamazaki-san?”

The gunshots in his earpiece mirrored gunshots frighteningly close to the building he was in. 

“Ryuugazaki,” Matsuoka said, and Rei could hear the grin in his voice. “Hold tight.”

Rei, preoccupied with the loss of Yamazaki and Matsuoka so quickly didn’t realize they were right under his nose. They were close, practically overlapping his own location. Then, it came quickly.

Behind him, around him, the sound of a spark like a firework, a rumble like the warning of an earthquake, then an explosion. Rei’s body was thrown against a column, his back smacking against hard concrete. With his glasses askew, he opened his eyes as sharp, painful ringing fell in his ear. A shadow loomed over him when he closed his eyes again, reorienting himself against the rubble falling around him and the small fires crackling and popping next to him.

“Ryuugazaki,” someone said. A hand fell upon his shoulder and squeezed it. “Hey.”

Rei opened his eyes.

Horrified. He was horrified. In front of him was someone he least expected. Red hair, perfectly tousled and messy framing a sharp profiled face. High cheekbones. Eyes, dilated and bright.

“Ah,” he said, squeezing his shoulder again. “Thank goodness. You’re okay.”

Okay could run against a scale. From being in bed, encompassed in soft, warm sheets to being slightly (highly) bruised from slamming into a slab of concrete. Rei was leaning more towards the okay ranging to the “slamming into a slab of concrete”. But Rin was right. He was okay. Or rather, alive. He was alive, but hurting. Everywhere.

“Oh my god,” Rei replied, intelligently.

“Well then,” he laughed, pulling Rei up. Rei continued to stare. “I guess we can finally meet. Like you said.”

“Matsuoka Rin,” Matsuoka said, bowing slightly then holding out a hand, “Nice to meet you.”

If someone were to know of Rei’s career, they would probably ask him about the possibility of it being similar to summer blockbusters. The explosions were similar but they were much more difficult to dodge. They weren’t that easy to walk away from either. The pens did not shoot lasers, neither could sunglasses. Weapons could definitely be smaller than someone’s palm and larger than a small dog. But no, every agent had a name, not a number assigned to them. And everyone, over the hazardous dangers of the job, were actually pretty normal. They had Christmas parties when possible -- last time, if Rei would recall, was a couple years ago and there were mishaps with some agents thinking their gifts of water guns were real guns. They had breaks and break rooms with a dangerous amount of pastries. They had days off when the missions allowed. It was like any other job, just played up to be glitzy and glamorous through the magic of cinema. Something sparkling, something exciting.

It was nothing like that. Until Rei met Matsuoka Rin. Because Matsuoka, with his easy grin and his open laugh, looked like he stepped fresh out of a top-selling action film.

Rei, robotic and stiff, held out his hand. Rin took it and shook his hand firmly. Sirens, outside the rubble and inside Rei’s head blared loudly and sharply.

Of course, Rin’s hands were soft.

\---

"So," Haru asked, raising an eyebrow as he slowly stirred his coffee, “You were an actor this time?”

Haru was someone he met in university. Like Rei, he was like a lone wolf of sorts, keeping to the corners or the fronts of classrooms until fate would give them a disappearing pencil or a biting fever, cutting the silence they’ve had since the start of their school career. With thick tension in the air, Haru cut that silence first. He forgot his pencil and had a cold that left him in bed for three days. Rei was his only hope. In reality, Rei was the first person he saw in the classroom after falling ill. Somewhere along the line, they became people who went out for coffee or tea to study, and sometimes, if time would allow, Haru’s house for home cooked meals. friends. It comforted Rei to have someone, even if he couldn’t disclose everything. His presence at least felt enough.

Rei laughed to cut away the lies that continued to spill out of his mouth. "Haru-san, please. I'm not an actor. I told you already. I work within the cinema department of another university creating film trailers for their projects."

“So today you walked into class late with blood stained on your shirt and burnt holes all over it and you complained about your back hurting because you created a film trai -- Wait, Rei, don’t gulp your coffee like that it’s too hot --”

Haru reached over the table, silverware clattering in his wake as he tugged the cup out of Rei’s hands. Rei sputtered, took the napkin out of his lap and pressed it against his mouth. Haru watched him, wide-eyed and silent. The coffee was indeed hot, but at least it was a pain Rei could take compared to the gripping silence he had to keep when anyone would ask about his job.

His dream conversation would be like so:

“So what do you do for a living?” someone would ask, smiling easily, conversationally.

“I am a quartermaster for a secret agent service headquartered here in Japan. I sometimes do field work with the agents but usually I am allowed to work comfortably with the highest speed of wifi you can imagine. Ah, yes, I also have Saturdays off. But only once in awhile. Awhile meaning -- several months apart. And definitely not when the director commands me to help find someone extremely wanted within a 50-mile radius. Then I am off to creating more technology to make missions much more efficient. Deadly or not.”

They would smile again. They would laugh at how ridiculous it all seemed and surely, there needed to be at least sick days, Ryuugazaki-san. In his dream, Rei would have them. He would have that and more. Except his life isn’t a dream.

He coughed, throat burning as Haru pushed water towards him, a frown on his face.

“Rei, seriously,” he began, “I don’t -- drink slowly -- understand you sometimes.”

After slow gulps of his water, Rei said, “What exactly do you mean?”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you with holes in your shirt.”

And that was Rei’s fault. He was on the clock no matter what time of day. Holidays were something given never. He had a dream once of a slow day with rain and soft jazz, as if his life were something different, until he was pulled out with a late night call about a weaponless agent running around Singapore with need of some dire assistance. Considering he was in university, he was confident that his professors would see him just as another oddball of a student, parading around in fake blood and holes in shirts because that’s exactly what Rei saw with his schoolmates. Of course, Rei would never. If he could, he would have access to pressed shirts in his pocket but technological advancements ran too slow for him to create such an invention.

“Well I -- You know, sometimes they need some extras and --” his voice faded when he saw it: Haru’s eyes glazing over, his eyes staring at nothing as he listened to Rei. It was a sign that whatever Rei said was drivel and overall, bullshit. Rei shut his mouth, staring sadly at his coffee. “And I couldn’t change my shirt.”

Haru sighed, “Okay. But at least tell me that wasn’t your blood?”

“Some of it was mine. I tripped over something.” Rei waved at himself vaguely. “But it wasn’t a hard fall.”

Haru tipped his chin up, looking for a waiter. “But are you okay?”

Rei’s back was badly bruised and the infirmary at the headquarters didn’t take very long to patch him up. They told him he’d heal in a few days time. Healing didn’t necessarily mean nothing wouldn’t hurt. 

He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I’m all right, thank you.”

Haru said nothing, and instead raised his hand to flag down a waiter for two extra coffees. 

To fill the distance Rei created with the lies he told Haru, he proceeded to talk about something else, something farther from the holes and the blood and closer to the next school assignments the professor assigned yesterday. Every time he had done this, Haru would remain the same: unconvinced, yet respectful of his privacy. He wanted to tell Haru that the shirt and injuries had nothing to do with himself. It wasn’t anything to do with filming movies. It involved an agent. A new one who had too much confidence, too much warmth and to Rei’s dismay, too much of his type-in-a-guy that he hoped the director would transfer him to another agency in another prefecture. As luck would have it, like anything else with Rei’s luck, that would never happen.

\---

Rei always left his apartment to take the train at 6:30am sharp, no more, no less. He was someone who enjoyed an immense amount of balance in his life and if it started off badly, he knew it would end badly. He would never drink more than two cups of coffee a day unless given the circumstances that whatever mission the agents would take required all nights. “Never” usually always became “sometimes.” Today was not an exception. He has had three coffees before noon. When he recoded the firewall to refresh security, one of his assistants accidentally wiped out the past code. When he left his office to test the prototype for a gun specifically made for the new agents, it set off without anyone near it. Rei was precise and careful with his job. Today was the complete opposite of that.

He was writing to the quartermaster in Kyoto when someone walked into the office. Someone walked into his office as he typed furiously. _Foolishly_ , he wrote, you believed transmission signals transcended region codes and surely, this was just an honest mistake. It was a problem -- not in his case, but in theirs -- that needed to be addressed accordingly until the next mission or else dire circumstances would be --

“Excuse me,” someone said from somewhere in front of Rei. They cleared their throat.

Rei sighed, pushing up his glasses before looking up. He tensed. It was Matsuoka.

Matsuoka gave a laugh, nervously. He slipped his hands into his slacks and said, “I want to apologize for yesterday. Sousuke told me you were late for class. He also told me your back was bruised.”

Rei gave out his own laugh, more irritated than nervous. Not irritated at all from his apology but from the uniform Matsuoka fit so well. The new uniforms came in that morning and Rei had mindlessly passed the mirror without inspecting it because of his determination to fix broken firewalls. Now he sees, with Matsuoka, that the uniform is perfect on him. Tailored pinstriped black slacks. A white button down, crisp and clean again his pale skin. Rei cursed inwardly at the way his sleeves, rolled up to his elbows to reveal a curl of ink beginning at the crook of his forearms. Rei’s eyes lingered for a moment, staring unashamed until Matsuoka cleared his throat again. Rei shot his gaze back at his face, a flush racing up his skin.

“Uh,” he began, then looked down, shuffling random files to avoid Matsuoka’s eyes. “Well yes, I’m glad you came. I appreciate the apology.”

Matsuoka walked closer, taking a seat in the chair across from Rei, “I would like to make it up --”

“Okay!” Rei said, shooting up to walk towards his bookshelf.

“So I was thinking maybe I could --”

Rei didn’t let him finish. He waved animatedly over to the files he shuffled into a disorganized heap. “As you can tell I’m incredibly busy. if you could leave me now, I would appreciate it very much.”

He continued to stare hard at his bookshelf, his finger passing titles he knew he would not pick up for another couple of weeks. If staring hard at a row of books would work to get Matsuoka to leave, then so be it. Even if Rei couldn’t find the reason to why he should. He considered that it was definitely the tattoos. (It wasn’t.) They were offensive and he wanted them out. (No, he didn’t.) Unfortunately, Matsuoka was attached to them. 

He froze as he heard Matsuoka try again, an intake of breath before he stopped, The chair creaked as he got up.

“I’ll leave you to it then,” he said, voice quiet. Rei waited a moment before turning around. He sighed, after a moment, looking down at the book he clutched in his white-knuckled hands. _The Anatomy of Thought_ , it read. There was no anatomy to the thoughts that continued to spiral within Rei’s mind. Every time Matsuoka walked in and out of his normal routine, whatever structure he created vanished.

Rei sighed again, tipping his head back. He breathed in, collecting his erratic, beating heart, his traveling thoughts. He breathed out, pushing them away until he was met with silence. But there was a hum, a warmth, something beating small but true in his heart. He pushed that away too, even if it was determined to stay.

**Author's Note:**

> aaaand here we go! fun story: i was watching skyfall and admiring q's Everything when i realized that his banter with bond would work really well in a fic. surprise, i picked rei because he's perfect and rin because he's also perfect and this was alternatively titled "skyfallau" in my drafts when it spiraled into this thing that is now 20+ pages. and it has nothing to do with skyfall. it was also supposed to be an exercise for my writing but it's... yknow, it's much more than that now, haha. here's the first chapter! i expect a few after this. but i won't make any promises. 
> 
> talk to me about the rinreis or anything else either on my [twitter](https://twitter.com/lightalong) or [tumblr](http://pilotgirls.tumblr.com/)!


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